Originally Posted by
Uplinker
My boss once phoned me some days after I had gone around and asked me what happened. His tone suggested he was expecting a long convoluted excuse, so when I said, "Oh that's easy to answer; I cocked it up" (I was too fast on approach at the stability check gate). There was a pause and then the mood lightened considerably. He started laughing and said, "Oh, OK, well try not to do it again, bye !".
If pilots are flying outside the limits, then it is only common sense that reasons must be found. There might be training issues that the company has not spotted, and if a trend is noticed they can train against it. If pilots are flying like cowboys, then they need to be reined in.
Where I've worked in recent years you never get a call about going around, you get a call if things weren't right and you didn't go around.
I've been around long enough to remember the 'cowboys', legends in their own mind who wouldn't use checklists and flew Space Shuttle unspooled approaches in a 727.
250 to the marker and configure on the way down. Or, the 'tower watch this' zoom climb takeoff with pax onboard.
FOQA and some of those other acronyms have cleaned up the business and made things safer, but perhaps more paranoid, for us all.
A few years ago we were sometimes flight planned at near our maximum Mach number to keep the crew duty day within limits. In smooth air no problem, Mr. Boeing builds a stable airplane. However, a few bumps (e.g. over Japan) or a temperature change and you could easily overspeed slightly and get the EICAS and aural warnings. Open the speed window, dial back a few knots, problem solved.
At some point the feds decided that even a momentary overspeed warning was an 'exceedance' and needed to be logged and investigated as an incident. There was some verbiage in a systems manual that said the warning came on several knots before VMO/MMO but the inflight activation of a warning system required a maintenance writeup, a signoff and an operations report. Obviously I didn't want to spend my layovers trying to type an explanation into a computer form so I backed off the speed a bit to avoid the warning.
Did this make the operation safer? I'm not sure but I have found myself worrying about what went on the FOQA record and doing a go around because I was stable at 800 feet but not at 1000. Or delaying a takeoff because I didn't have data for the intersection in use even though the numbers for an upwind intersection with less runway looked good. Years ago folks would laugh at those decisions but now things are much more CYA in my observation. And, maybe I have more of a conscience knowing that any decision I make is recorded and subject to review, sometimes weeks later.